This issue has been beaten to death by every pundit, blogger and celebrity with a craving to regurgitate their messy opinion all over us. I don't want to get into the moral dilemma. It bores me. Instead I'd like to focus on the cultural aspect of this issue and see if it could have been prevented. Is Tiger Woods morally bankrupt? I doubt it. Is he addicted to sex? Laughable. Tiger is simply a product of our society and how we esteem phenoms. His inability to withstand the social pressures of celebrity could have a lot to do with a lack of example in the world of golf.
I needed a small sample size for phenoms, so I set the cut-off point for age at 25 years old. I wanted to see athletes that won early and often in their careers. I also needed a cut-off point for the year. The media and their 24/7 coverage plays a large factor in this, so going back too far would eliminate that culture from the equation. The results are hardly surprising. Golf is an old man's game; there are very few prodigies.
Since 1970, there have been only 9 golfers to win a major championship under the age of 25. Of those nine, only three of them were able to win multiple championships before turning 26.
1) Brit Tony Jacklin won his second major, the 1970 U.S. Open, at 25. He failed to win another, although experienced a great deal of success in the Ryder Cup.
2) Spaniard Seve Ballesteros won the 1979 British Open at 22 and followed up his performance with a win at the 1980 Masters. He won three more majors (1983 Masters, 1984 British Open, 1988 British Open) after turning 25 for a career total of five.
3) Woods won the Masters in 1997 at 21. He became the youngest person ever to win the Masters (and the youngest to win a major since 1922). Tiger then went on to win 5 more majors before turning 26, including four straight championships from 2000-01. He has 14 total majors, placing him 2nd all-time on that list.
Tiger not only blew away expectations, but continued that sustained success. Seve and Tony are great, but they can't touch Woods. He garnered a tremendous amount of attention from the media and became an American icon. The face of golf. With all of this attention came the social pressures as Woods dove headfirst into the culture of American celebrity.
A recent series of articles on ESPN Insider can shed some more light on this. They have a blog in which current star players from all the major sports anonymously talk about life as a professional athlete in the 21st century. In both NBA Player X and NFL Player X's columns, they talked about the culture of their sport. When a brash and immature rookie phenom enters the league they have a large number of veteran players (on their team no less) to show them how to stay out of trouble. The younger athletes listen because the older guys have just gone through it. It doesn't become a game of "when I was your age" because the difference is only a few years apart.
When Tiger blew up the golf world in the late 90s, what example could he follow? The two closest American comparisons I could find to Woods were Tom Watson (8 championships, first at 25) and Jack Nicklaus (18 championships, first at 22). In 1997, when Woods won his first championship, Watson was 48 and Nicklaus was 57. Is a 21-year-old really going to take life advice from these guys? Probably not. Neither Watson or Nicklaus had to deal with the 24/7 news cycle or the omnipresent internet.
Golf had never seen someone like Woods and while this certainly doesn't excuse his behavior, it sheds some light onto why his homely malfeasance became a spectacle. There was no one for Tiger to look up to in the golf world, but himself. Our society placed Tiger on a pedestal and he took that entitlement and flaunted it. As a product of both our culture and the archaic nature of golf, a phenom's social downfall was inevitable. It happened to be Tiger Woods. He now becomes the example that future phenoms will steer clear from duplicating.
No comments:
Post a Comment